The Gospel According to the Son

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Before I was born, Joseph had been a widower. He was many years older than my mother, but asked her to consider marriage. Since he was an Essene, he declared that he would respect their difference in age: To protect her, he would serve first as her guardian and then they would be wed. She agreed. And Joseph waited.

There came a night, however, when the angel Gabriel entered her bedchamber. As Mary would tell it to Joseph, this angel said: "The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women."

My mother, like Joseph, was an Essene, and so was her mother. Virtue had built a fence around the first fence in order to guard her. Nonetheless, the angel Gabriel was radiant, and the white of his garment was like the light of the moon. In that light she shivered yet felt much admired. She also felt weak. All that she knew had left her.

The angel said, "Mary, thou hast found favor with God. Thou shalt conceive in thy womb and bring forth a son. Call his name Jesus. He shall be great and he shall be called the Son of the Highest." These words are taken from the Gospel of Luke, but according to my mother, the angel said little. All the same, she had seen the glory of the Lord (if only for an instant), and knew by the heavenly turn in her breast that she was with child. The scent of the air was sweeter than any garden. Then the angel left. He had not even touched her hand.

When Joseph learned that she was pregnant, he threw himself down and wept. "What prayer can be said," he asked, "on her behalf or on mine? She was a virgin and I did not protect her."

But then Joseph grew angry and said, "Why did you bring this shame on yourself?"

She began to cry. "I am innocent," she told him, "and I have never known a man."

Joseph did not know what to do. To conceal her sin would be to trespass upon the Law. Yet if he told the Essene priests, Mary could be stoned to death. He said to himself: "In quiet, I will put her away from me."

So Joseph made plans to hide her among relatives who lived in the hills to the west. Mary, however, went to visit her own cousin, Elizabeth, who lived in the hills to the east, for Elizabeth was six months pregnant. And while Mary was gone, a voice came to Joseph in his sleep: "Take the young woman as your wife. For she is not pregnant by a man, and her son is blessed."

When Joseph awoke, it was with the conviction that they must wed. As soon as Mary returned to Nazareth, he married her, but he was scrupulous. Joseph did not know her, nor did he desire to know her until I was born. And they named me Jesus, which in Nazareth, by our rough dialect, is Yeshua. That was still my name when I went to visit John the Baptist and was blessed by him and spent forty days on a mountain in the wilderness. Before we can speak of those days, however, there is much to tell, and some of it is before my birth.